Tag Archives: Louise Jopling

If a person can be known by the company he keeps, James Tissot’s friends indicate he was charming, broad-minded and cultured, interested in music and literature as well as art, resourceful, and unafraid of change. Described as reserved, he had a strong work ethic and spent a great deal of time working in his studio. But he seems to have made friends easily and maintained numerous mutually satisfying relationships over many years – with both men and women, of varied ages, religions, backgrounds, and temperaments.

James Tissot, age 20-21

Jacques Joseph Tissot’s first friend may have been his mother. When he realized that what he really wanted was a career in art instead of architecture, his businessman father was less than thrilled. His father told him that if he was determined to pursue this unreliable profession, he was going to have to make it on his own – with no financial help. But his mother found a connection for him in Paris, and Jacques left home at 19, in 1856 (i.e before he turned 20 that October).

Within three years of his arrival in Paris, Tissot was ready to exhibit his work at the Salon. Competing with established artists, the 23-year-old student submitted five entries for the Salon of 1859. The jury accepted them all, including Portrait de Mme T…, a small oil painting of his mother. With her belief in him, his career in the capital of the European art world was launched.

James Whistler

When Jacques Joseph Tissot exhibited in the Salon, it was as James Tissot – and it’s likely he borrowed the name from another young art student, James Whistler.

It is thought that when Tissot registered for permission to copy paintings at the Louvre on January 26, 1857, he met the pugnacious American James McNeill Whistler (1834 – 1903), reportedly while copying Ingres’ 1819 Ruggiero Freeing Angelica side by side in the Luxembourg Museum.

In 1859, Tissot met another art student, with whom he became close friends – Edgar Degas (1834 – 1917). Degas, the curmudgeonly son of a prosperous banker from Naples and a mother from New Orleans, had spent the previous three years traveling in central Italy. Probably through Degas, Tissot soon met the charismatic, restless Édouard Manet (1832–1883).

Lawrence Alma-Tadema

In 1859, Tissot traveled to Antwerp, augmenting his art education by taking lessons in the studio of Belgian painter Hendrik Leys. There he made friends with a young Dutch art student working with Leys, Lourens Tadema (1836 – 1912; the painter moved to London in 1870 and restyled himself Lawrence Alma-Tadema).

Alma-Tadema’s personality combined middle-class sensibilities with a ribald sense of humor. He was an extrovert who loved wine, women, music, and practical jokes.

Édouard Manet

Emmanuel Chabrier, by Édouard Manet

Though still living in the dilapidated Latin Quarter at 29, Tissot was enjoying increasing professional success and was described as a boulevardier – a man-about-town. In addition to painters, his friends included the poet Camille-André Lemoyne (1822 – 1907), “a man of modesty and merit” who dedicated a published poem, “Baigneuse,” to Tissot in 1860, and composer, pianist and bon vivantEmmanuel Chabrier (1841 – 1894), whose portrait Tissot drew in 1861. His circles often overlapped; Chabrier, for example, was friends with Degas and Manet as well.

John Everett Millais

In 1862, Tissot traveled to London, where the first exhibition of his work was at the International Exhibition. He showed one of his début paintings from the Paris Salon of 1859, and he must have met Britain’s most popular painter, John Everett Millais (1829 – 1896). Warm-hearted, boyish, and boundlessly self-confident, Millias had a wife and five children to provide for by this time. He found a steady source of income drawing illustrations, for periodicals such as Once a Week and The Cornhill Magazine as well as Tennyson’s Poems (1857) and Anthony Trollope’s novel Framley Parsonage (1860). James Tissot, at 26, having inherited his parents’ business sense, was exploring a new art market and making useful contacts.

Alphonse Daudet

In 1863, Tissot became close friends with Alphonse Daudet (1840 – 1897), a young writerwho had published a volume of poetry (The Lovers) in 1858, and who rented the room below him in the rue Bonaparte. Daudet, who was kind, hard-working, generous and sociable, was employed as a secretary to the Duc de Morny, the Emperor’s illegitimate half-brother who served as a powerful appointed minister. He eventually became wealthy from his novels, in which he wrote about the poor and downtrodden with sympathy, and his friendship with Tissot was a lifelong one.

In 1864, the year Millais was elected a member of the Royal Academy,Tissot again exhibited work in London: two pictures on display at the Society of British Artists, and a small oil painting at the Royal Academy Exhibition. In France, Tissot associated, loosely, with a band of artistic rebels led by Manet – men who met at the Café de Bade to debate the purpose of art and express their frustration with the rigidity of the Paris art Establishment. But Tissot was a traditionalist at heart. He must have admired Millais – as a man, as a painter, and as a successful businessman. In 1865, Tom Taylor’s Ballads and Songs of Brittany was published in London, illustrated by several artists including Millais and Tissot, who provided the Frontispiece and further widened his reputation in Great Britain.

Ernest Meissonier

Ferdinand Heilbuth

In 1866, the thirty-year-old artist bought land to build a villa on the most prestigious of Baron Haussmann’s grand new Parisian boulevards, the eleven-year-old avenue de l’Impératrice (now avenue Foch). By the Salon of 1868, Tissot had occupied his newly built, elegant mansion in the splendid avenue, the place to see and be seen amid the heady delights of life in the imperial capital. But an early biographer asserted that there were no parties or receptions in this home, as Tissot dreaded the noise; he hosted only quiet gatherings with intimates such as Degas, eminent painter and sculptor Ernest Meissonier (1815 –1891), and painter Ferdinand Heilbuth (1826 – 1889).

Alfred Stevens

Tissot and wildly successful Belgian painter Alfred Stevens (1823 –1906) moved in the same social circle, which included Manet, Degas, Frédéric Bazille, Berthe Morisot and Whistler as well as Alma-Tadema. Stevens and his wife held regular receptions at their home on Wednesdays. Tissot may have preferred quiet evenings with his friends in his new villa, but in early 1868, he scribbled a hurried message to Degas on the back of a used envelope when he found Degas away from his studio: “I shall be at Stevens’ house tonight.” He had dropped by to give Degas advice on finishing a problematic painting-in-progress, Interior (The Rape) before the Salon deadline.

Tissot appears to have been content to live well and maintain a fairly low profile in the art world he had conquered within a decade of his arrival as a provincial art student. Oddly, there are almost no references to Tissot in letters, journals or accounts of his chatty friends and acquaintances during this time, even though his studio was a chic gathering place, and it is likely he visited crowded, gossipy weekly soirées such as those hosted by Madame Manet (Edouard’s formidable mother) on Tuesdays, the Stevenses on Wednesdays, and Madame Morisot (Berthe’s formidable mother) on Thursdays.

In 1869, Tissot began contributing political cartoons to the newest Society journal in London, Vanity Fair, founded by Thomas Gibson Bowles (1841 – 1922). Tommy Bowles was the illegitimate son of Thomas Milner Gibson (1806 – 1884), a Liberal MP for Manchester and President of the Board of Trade from 1859 to 1866, and a servant, Susannah Bowles. Tommy’s father (and even his father’s wife, Arethusa Susannah, a Society hostess who was the daughter of Sir Thomas Gery Cullum of Hardwick House, Suffolk, and their six children) acknowledged him. Tissot, at 33, was famous in Paris. Tommy, a handsome blue-eyed blonde, was five or six years younger and making a name for himself, even in France, with his controversial articles in London’s Morning Post.

It is strange, the life Tissot led – an exclusive address and titled patrons in Paris and yet close friends with the individualistic, struggling Edgar Degas (who ceased to exhibit in the Salon after this year, due to his discontent with it), the illegitimate and irreverent London publisher Tommy Bowles, and the renegade James Whistler, who was considered belligerent and uncouth by this time.

It seems that James Tissot was a peaceable, refined, and multifaceted gentleman, truly his own man – in a world about to implode.

The Franco-Prussian War united Tissot and Tommy Bowles, who raced to Paris as a war correspondent. Because there were not enough French troops, a National Guard – a volunteer militia independent of the regular army – was forming to defend Paris. On Friday, September 9, 1870, Tommy was surveying the scene of Garde Mobile squads drilling or wandering around along the avenue de l’Impératrice [near James Tissot’s sumptuous villa at No. 64], “when my hand was suddenly seized, and I found myself talking to one of my smartest Parisian friends [James Tissot] who had donned the blue uniform like everybody else. He was delighted to see me.” Tissot gamely promised that if there was a sortie, he would make sure that Tommy had the chance to see some action. [Tissot scholar Willard E. Misfeldt learned that James Tissot actually had enlisted in the Garde Nationale de la Seine, the Fourth Company of the Eighteenth Battalion, in 1855 – as soon as he had arrived in Paris at age 19.]

In early October, military operations blocked access to Tissot’s new villa, and he turned up at Bowles’ rented apartments. Tommy observed affectionately of his friend, “We neither of us have got any money left, but we propose to support each other by our mutual credit…and to share our last rat together. Meantime we are not greatly to be pitied. Our joint domestic, Jean, one of those handy creatures yet to be invented in England, makes our beds, scrubs the floor, brushes the clothes, cooks like a cordon bleu, and is, as we believe and fervently hope, capable of producing any explanation or invention that may be required by persons in search of payment. He has been especially successful as regards meat.” The British journalist and the French painter shared a mischievous sense of humor, numerous dangerous sorties – and strong survival instincts.

On October 21, 1870, the men in Tissot’s unit – the Éclaireurs of the Seine, an elite unit of scouts and snipers (tirailleurs) – “one and all Parisians of the purest type” according to Tommy Bowles – were sent to fight in the Battle of Malmaison (also referred to as the Battle of Rueil-Malmaison, or La Jonchère, for the nearby towns), west of Paris. [See James Tissot and The Artists’ Brigade, 1870-71.]

During the war, James Tissot fought with valor on the front line, and he later volunteered as a Red Cross stretcher-bearer. Then he became involved in the bloody civil uprising that followed, the Paris Commune. He fled to London with a hundred francs in his pocket. There, he had plenty of friends to help him rebuild his life.

Chichester Fortescue

Besides Tommy Bowles, there was Frances, Countess Waldegrave(1821 – 1879), an influential Liberal Society hostess whose fourth and final husband was Chichester Fortescue (1823 – 1898), an Irish MP, who became Lord Carlingford. Tissot may have met her through Millais, who frequented her salons. She shared Tissot’s interest in spiritualism and painting, and at some point, Tissot painted her portrait in her boudoir. (The portrait, whereabouts unknown, was not considered a good likeness.)

In 1871 – shortly after Tissot fled Paris – the charming and “irresistible” Countess Waldegrave pulled strings to get Tissot a lucrative commission to paint a full-length portrait of Fortescue, which was funded by a group of eighty-one Irishmen including forty-nine MPs, five Roman Catholic bishops and twenty-seven peers to commemorate his term as Chief Secretary for Ireland under Gladstone – as a present to his wife.

Ouida

Tissot also was friendly with Society novelist Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé, 1839 – 1908); on June 19, 1871, she sent him an invitation to visit on June 21, with the promise that “some English artists will enjoy the great pleasure of meeting you & seeing your sketches.” Described as having a “sinister, clever face” and a “voice like a carving knife,” Ouida lived in the Langham Hotel, where surrounded by purple flowers, she wrote on large sheets of violet-colored notepaper in bed by candlelight. Her lavish soirées included celebrities such as Oscar Wilde, J.E. Millais. Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Wilkie Collins, along with dozens of handsome guard officers.

Once Tissot moved to London in 1871, he continually sought “British” subject matter, always offering it up with a French twist. He soon found a friend in Captain John Freebody (1834 – 1899), master of the Arundel Castle from 1872-73, when he took emigrants to America. Captain Freebody’s wife, Margaret Kennedy (1840 – 1930), modeled for The Captain’s Daughter, set at the Falcon Tavern in Gravesend. Tissot exhibited The Captain’s Daughter, as well as two other paintings [The Last Evening (1873) and Too Early (1873)], at the Royal Academy in 1873.

Two other paintings featuring Margaret Kennedy are in a private collection: Boarding the Yacht (1873) and The Captain and the Mate (1873), in which Margaret’s older brother, red-bearded Captain Lumley Kennedy (1819 – 1899), and her sister posed as well. Tissot, having grown up in the bustling seaport of Nantes, where his father was a successful wholesale linen draper (a trader in fabrics and dress trimmings to retailers and exporters), must have felt quite comfortable with sailors and their families.

Within a few years of hard work and help from such friends, Tissot bought the leasehold to a house in St. John’s Wood, at 17 (now 44) Grove End Road, and built an extension with a studio and a conservatory. A handsome and talented 35-year-old Parisian, he earned and returned the respect of intelligent and capable women.

Louise Jopling

British painter Louise Jopling (1843 – 1933) lived in Paris from 1865 to 1869, when her ne’er-do-well husband, Frank Romer, was sent packing by his employer, Baron de Rothschild. Louise had been painting with the encouragement of the Baroness, a watercolor artist, and after moving to London, Louise continued painting despite numerous hardships. Her work was exhibited at the Royal Academy exhibitions after 1870, and she met “that extraordinarily clever French artist, James Tissot,” when his
picture, Too Early, “made a great sensation” at the 1873 exhibition. Tissot gave her a sketch of Gravesend he made that year. In her 1925 autobiography, Louise wrote of him, “James Tissot was a charming man, very handsome.”

Louise proved to be an excellent source of information on Tissot’s personality, including this anecdote about a day they spent with Ferdinand Heilbuth. She wrote, “Heilbuth was a delightful man as well as an excellent painter. He was a great friend of Tissot…One day, before I was married, he arrived at my studio and said he had a letter from Tissot, who begged him to come round to me and try to induce [my sister] Alice and I to come spend the day at Greenwich where he was painting his charming pictures of scenes by the Thames. I was to bring my sketching materials. I had promised [my fiancé] Joe to give him a sitting for my portrait, but it was much too delightful a project not to be accepted with fervor. I wired to Joe, “Called out of town on business.”

Berthe Morisot, by Édouard Manet

Berthe Morisot (1841 – 1895) also appreciated Tissot. He socialized frequently in 1875, inviting Berthe Morisot to dinner at his home in St. John’s Wood when she was in England for her honeymoon. She wrote to her sister, Edma Pontillon, “We went to see Tissot, who does very pretty things that he sells at high prices; he is living like a king. We dined there. He is very nice, a very good fellow, though a little vulgar. We are on the best of terms; I paid him many compliments, and he really deserves them.”

During the same trip, Berthe wrote to her mother, “[I was dragged out of bed] just now by a letter from Tissot – an invitation to dinner for tomorrow night. I had to get up and ransack everything to find a clean sheet of paper in order to reply.” Later, she added, “He was very amiable, and complimented me although he has probably never seen any of my work.”

In 1873, Tissot joined the Arts Club in Hanover Square, and in 1875, Italian painter Giuseppe De Nittis (1846 –1884) wrote to his wife, Léontine, “I saw Tissot at the club, he was very nice, very friendly.”

In 1874, Degas invited both Tissot and De Nittis to display their work in the first exhibition by the French artists who would become known as the Impressionists. Tissot was achieving success in London and declined, but De Nittis accepted.

Sir Julius Benedict

Self-Portrait, Giuseppe Di Nittis

Another member of the Arts Club with whom Tissot was friendly was Sir Julius Benedict (1804 – 1885), the German-born composer and conductor who is portrayed as the pianist in Tissot’s Hush! (The Concert, 1875). The son of a Jewish banker, Benedict became a naturalised Englishman and was knighted in 1871.

After spending several weeks in Venice with Manet, Tissot dined at his friend Jimmy Whistler’s three-storey townhouse in Lindsey Row, Chelsea on November 16, 1875 with Alan S. Cole (1846 – 1934, a lace and textile expert who was the son of Sir Henry Cole, the first director of the South Kensington Museum, now the V&A), independent-minded, outspoken painter Albert Moore (1841 – 1893) and Captain Crabb (commander of The Brazilian in 1870) on topics such as “ideas on art unfettered by principles.”

George Adolphus Storey

On December 7, Tissot returned to dine with Jimmy, his patron Cyril Flower (1843 – 1907, later Lord Battersea), and painter George Adolphus Storey (1834 – 1919); they conversed on the works of Balzac.

As desirable he was as a guest, Tissot must have enjoyed entertaining in his turn. Louise Jopling noted of Tissot, “At one time he was very hospitable, and delightful were the dinners he gave. But these ceased when he became absorbed in a grande passion with a married woman.”

Kathleen’s two children lived with her sister’s family around the corner, and they and their cousins visited Kathleen and Tissot regularly. Tissot’s social life drastically changed, and he must have judged his love affair with the discarded young beauty well worth the sacrifice. Though cohabitation was common in Victorian England, especially in bohemian circles, it was not socially acceptable to most people in the middle and upper classes.

Though Tissot and Mrs. Newton were not invited out, their friendship was valued, and plenty of lively friends sought their company. One of Kathleen’s nieces, interviewed as an adult, recalled, “Whistler and Oscar Wilde, with his brother Willie, were constant visitors,” as were actor Henry Irving (1838 – 1905), actor-manager Charles Wyndham (1837 – 1919), and actress Miss Mary Moore (1860 – 1931, who became Wyndham’s second wife in 1916, the year he was widowed). Tommy Bowles, his longtime friend, remained a frequent visitor and introduced others including landscape painter William Stone (c. 1840 – 1913), who “often had tea in the garden with Tissot and the lady.” Stone, perhaps revealing the essence of Tissot’s charm, observed, “Tissot was quite a boulevardier and could not grasp our somewhat puritanical outlook.”

If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot. Read reviews.

The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

James Tissot often reused models, both male and female, in his paintings. While he varied their poses to capture different angles of their faces, several of his models are recognizable from picture to picture within a few years’ time. In some cases, subsequent paintings seem based on sketches for earlier works.

The brunette with the languid eyelids in The Two Sisters (1863, figure a) also appears in Portrait of Mademoiselle L.L., (1864, figure b) and Spring (1865, figure c). Tissot painted these pictures in Paris, in the waning years of the Second Empire.

a b c

After Tissot moved to London, following the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, he painted another model, a pale woman with strawberry-blonde hair, in Les Adieux (The Farewells, 1871, figure a), the woman on the left in Bad News (The Parting, 1872, figure b), and a variant of that painting, Tea (1872, figure c).

a b c

By 1873, Tissot befriended a ship’s captain, John Freebody, and his young wife, Margaret Freebody (née Kennedy), as well as her brother, Captain Lumley Kennedy. All three modeled for him that year in The Last Evening, The Captain and the Mate, and Boarding the Yacht (see James Tissot, ed. Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz, 1985).

The Last Evening (1873), by James Tissot. Margaret (Kennedy) Freebody and her brother, Captain Lumley Kennedy, posed for the figures in the chairs on the right. Margaret’s husband, Captain Freebody, is the man with the red beard.

Boarding the Yacht (1873), by James Tissot. Margaret (Kennedy) Freebody modeled for the woman on the right, and her sister for the woman on the left.

The Captain and the Mate (1873), by James Tissot. Margaret (Kennedy) Freebody sits on the left with her husband, Captain John Freebody, and her brother, Captain Lumley Kennedy is in the center.

The Captain’s Daughter (1873), by James Tissot. The woman is portrayed by Margaret (Kennedy) Freebody.

Tissot relied on a new model for Waiting for the Ferry at the Falcon Tavern(1874, figure a) and London Visitors (c. 1874, figure b).

a b

Tissot featured another lovely model, with an exquisite pointed nose, in Reading the News (1874, figure a), Chrysanthemums (c. 1874-76, figure b) and Still on Top (c. 1874, figure c).

a b c

A model with a soft fringe appears in Tissot’s A Passing Storm (c. 1876, figure a) and A Convalescent (c. 1876, figure b).

a b

The blonde woman in Autumn on the Thames, Nuneham Courtney (c. 1871-72, figure a) reappears years later, in Quarreling(c. 1874-76, figure b). Tissot also featured her in The Bunch of Lilacs (c. 1875, figure c).

I believe the model for these pictures was Alice, British painter Louise Jopling’s lovely blonde sister, who had attracted Tissot’s interest. Louise (1843–1933) wrote of Tissot in her 1925 autobiography, “He admired my sister Alice very much, and he asked her to sit to him, in the pretty house in St. John’s Wood.” In this photograph of Louise and her sisters, look at the blonde on the left, in the back, and compare for yourself!

a b c

That does make me wonder if Louise Jopling [at that time, the recently widowed Mrs. Frank Romer] modeled for Tissot. She wrote in her autobiography, “James Tissot was a charming man, very handsome, extraordinarily like the Duke [then, Prince] of Teck. He was always well groomed, and had nothing of artistic carelessness either in his dress or demeanor.” She thought Tissot was “extraordinarily clever,” and wrote that one day, before she was married (in 1874, to J.E. Millais’ friend, Joe Jopling), Tissot had begged his friend Ferdinand Heilbuth (1826 – 1889) to go to Louise’s studio “and try to induce us both – my sister Alice and I – to come and spend the day at Greenwich, where he was painting his charming pictures of scenes by the river Thames. I was to bring my sketching materials. It happened that I had promised Joe to give him a sitting for my portrait, but it was much too delightful a project not to be accepted with fervor. I wired to Joe: ‘Called out of town on business.’ I might have, with more truth, wired: ‘Called out of town on pleasure,’ but sketching with two such good artists was indeed good business for me, so I salved my conscience. But I was found out: Joe heard of our day’s outing, probably at that mart of gossip, a man’s Club.” [Louise Jopling is a character in my book, The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot – see my short (2:42 min.) video, “Louise Jopling and James Tissot”.]

Here is the model in Tissot’s Return from the Boating Party (1873, figure a), and Louise Jopling as Millais painted her in 1879 at age 36 (figure b). It does seem, however, that Louise would have mentioned in her autobiography that Tissot had painted her.

a b

Tissot used an older, white-haired woman as a model in Hush! (The Concert, 1875, figure a), A Convalescent (c. 1876, figure b), and also at the far left in Holyday (c 1876, figure c).

a b c

Tissot painted a striking model with dark hair and strong eyebrows in A Portrait (1876, figure a), and again in a blue gown in The Gallery of the H.M.S. Calcutta (Portsmouth, c. 1876, figure b). She reappears in Portsmouth Dockyard (c. 1877, figure c).

a b c

One of Tissot’s most often-reused models is the old gentleman with the white whiskers. He appears in Reading the News (1874, figure a), in the center of The Ball on Shipboard (c. 1874, figure b), and at the left in Hush! (The Concert, 1875, figure c), as well as in The Warrior’s Daughter (A Convalescent, c. 1878, figure d).

a b c d

Another distinctive male model who reappears in Tissot’s paintings is the man with a long ginger beard in London Visitors (c. 1874, figure a) and at the far left in Holyday (c. 1876, figure b). He also is featured in The Widower (1876, figure c).

a b c

Of course, after she moved into his home in St. John’s Wood about 1876, Tissot’s main model until her premature death was young mother and divorcée, Kathleen Irene Ashburnham Kelly Newton (1854 – 1882).

Kathleen, at 22, had a four-year-old daughter and a son born on March 21, 1876. [See Was Cecil Newton James Tissot’s son?] Being Roman Catholic, Kathleen could not remarry, but she lived with Tissot in his house in St. John’s Wood, until her death from tuberculosis in 1882.

Incidentally, Tissot scholar Michael Wentworth (1938 – 2002), in his comprehensive biography James Tissot (1984), identified the model in A Passing Storm (c. 1876) as Kathleen Newton, but if you compare the features of this model to Kathleen’s, it is obvious that the two women are different.

Based on my research and this study of the faces of Tissot’s various models, I believe Kathleen Newton’s first appearance in his work was in Portsmouth Dockyard (c. 1877).

Which means that the shadowy face in the center of The Thames (1876), would have been Kathleen’s as well.

If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot. Read reviews.

The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

The wealth of contemporary collectors of James Tissot’s oil paintings gives an idea of the monetary value of his paintings, but Tissot’s work also was esteemed by his friends.

In 1869, Tissot began contributing political cartoons to the newest Society journal in London, Vanity Fair, founded by Thomas Gibson Bowles (1841 – 1922). Tommy Bowles was the illegitimate son of Thomas Milner Gibson (1806 – 1884), a Liberal MP for Manchester and President of the Board of Trade from 1859 to 1866, and a servant, Susannah Bowles. Tommy’s father (and even his father’s wife and children) acknowledged him. Tissot, at 33, was famous in Paris. Tommy, a handsome and mischievous blue-eyed blonde, was five or six years younger and making a name for himself, even in France, with his controversial articles in London’s Morning Post.

By September 1869, Tommy Bowles was paying Tissot to provide caricatures of prominent men for Vanity Fair. Tommy, who gave himself a salary of five guineas a week, initially paid Tissot ten guineas for four drawings. Within a few weeks he increased Tissot’s compensation to eight pounds for each drawing: circulation had skyrocketed.

One of Tommy Bowles’ closest friends was the dashing Gus Burnaby (Frederick Gustavus Burnaby, 1842 – 1885), a captain in the privileged Royal Horse Guards, the cavalry regiment that protected the monarch. Gus, a member of the Prince of Wales’ set, had suggested the name, Vanity Fair, lent Bowles half of the necessary £200 in start-up funding, and then volunteered to
go to Spain to chronicle his adventures for the satirical magazine.

In 1870, Tommy Bowles, now 29, commissioned James Tissot to paint a small portrait of Burnaby. Tissot presented Gus in his “undress” uniform as a captain in the 3rd Household Cavalry – and as an elegant gentleman in a relaxed male conversation. The painting was purchased by London’s National Portrait Gallery from Bowles’ son (and Burnaby’s godson), George, in 1933.

Sydney Milner-Gibson (1872), by James Tissot. (Photo: wikimedia.org)

From the time he was a little boy, Tommy Bowles’ stepmother, Arethusa Susannah, a Society hostess who was the daughter of Sir Thomas Gery Cullum of Hardwick House, Suffolk, insisted that he be raised with his natural father’s family of four sons and two daughters. Tommy’s favorite half-sister was Sydney Milner-Gibson, eight years younger, and in 1872, when Sydney was in her early twenties, he commissioned James Tissot to paint her portrait.

In 1880, the unmarried Sydney died of enteric fever* – typhoid – at Hawstead, in Suffolk outside Bury St. Edmunds, two days before her thirty-first birthday. Her younger brother, George Gery Milner Gibson, died unmarried in 1921 and bequeathed most of the family portraits to the Borough of St. Edmundsbury. Tissot’s portrait of Miss Sydney Milner-Gibson, valued at £1.8 million, is on display at Moyse’s Hall Museum as part of a display in the Edwardson Room first floor gallery in an exhibit on Victorian costume.

In late 1875, Tommy Bowles married Jessica Evans Gordon (1852 – 1887). Her father, Major-General Charles Evans Gordon, was Governor of the Royal Victoria Military Hospital Netley, the largest military hospital in its day with 138 wards housing about one thousand beds. In the year following their marriage, Tissot made an informal portrait of her wearing her morning cap. After Jessica’s death at 35, Tommy wrote, “So bright and joyous, so gentle and gracious a spirit as hers…She was as near perfect wife and mother as may be.”

Frances, Countess Waldegrave (1821 – 1879) was an influential Liberal Society hostess whose fourth and final husband was Chichester Fortescue (1823 –1898), an Irish MP, who became Lord Carlingford. Tissot may have met her through John Everett Millais, who frequented her salons. She shared Tissot’s interest in spiritualism and painting, and at some point, Tissot painted her portrait in her boudoir. The portrait, whereabouts unknown, was not considered a good likeness.

In 1871 – shortly after Tissot had fled Paris – the charming and “irresistible” Countess Waldegrave pulled strings to get Tissot a lucrative commission to paint a full-length portrait of Fortescue, which was funded by a group of eighty-one Irishmen including forty-nine MPs, five Roman Catholic bishops and twenty-seven peers to commemorate his term as Chief Secretary for Ireland under Gladstone – as a present to his wife. The portrait was given to the University of Oxford by sitter’s nephew, Francis Fortescue Urquhart (1868-1934), Fellow of Balliol College, about 1904. It was re-hung in the North School in 1957.

Tissot’s great friend, Edgar Degas owned a pencil study for his 1872 painting, Tea. One of Tissot’s eighteenth-century costume paintings, it was calculated to appeal to British collectors once he had moved to London in mid-1871, following the Franco-Prussian War and its bloody aftermath, the Paris Commune.

Louise Jopling (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

British painter Louise Jopling (1843 – 1933) had lived in Paris from 1865 to 1869, when her ne’er-do-well husband, Frank Romer, was sent packing by his employer, Baron de Rothschild. Louise had been painting with the encouragement of the Baroness, a watercolor artist, and once living
in London, Louise continued painting despite numerous hardships. Her work was exhibited at the Royal Academy exhibitions after 1870, and she met “that extraordinarily clever French artist, James Tissot,” when his
picture, Too Early,“made a great sensation” at the 1873 exhibition. Tissot gave her a sketch of Gravesend he made that year. In her 1925 autobiography, Louise wrote of him, “James Tissot was a charming man, very handsome, extraordinarily like the Duke [then, Prince] of Teck. He was always well groomed, and had nothing of artistic carelessness either in his dress or demeanor. At one time he was very hospitable, and delightful were the dinners he gave. But these ceased when he became absorbed in a grande passion with a married woman who, to his great grief, died after he had known her but a brief time.”

Algernon Moses Marsden (1847 – 1920) was a more colorful character than James Tissot’s urbane portrait of him suggests. [To learn more about him, see Who was Algernon Moses Marsden?] He may have been Tissot’s picture dealer for a short time, though there is no information on any of Tissot’s paintings that Marsden may have sold. But Tissot’s In the Conservatory (Rivals), c. 1875, a masterpiece that was deaccessioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art at Christie’s, New York in October, 2013 [see For sale: In the Conservatory (Rivals), c. 1875, by James Tissot], is listed in the auction catalogue as having originally been “(probably) with Algernon Moses Marsden, London.” The catalogue suggests that Marsden modeled for one of the figures in this painting: “The dark-haired young man with moustache in the teatime scene looks very similar to Marsden, whose portrait Tissot painted in 1877.” Marsden poses in the elegant new studio of Tissot’s home in St. John’s Wood [the setting often is erroneously identified as Marsden’s study]. This portrait, just a bit larger than Tissot’s 1870 portrait of Gus Burnaby, remained in the Marsden family for nearly a century. Algernon Marsden at age 30 appears sophisticated and well-to-do, but he was a high-living scoundrel. Tissot’s portrait, which captures the man in his moment of youth and apparent success, was sold by Sotheby’s, London in 1971 for $4,838/£2,000. In 1983, it was sold by Christie’s, London for $65,677/£45,000. [Hammer prices.]

Algernon Moses Marsden’s aunt – Julia White, was married to Edward Fox White, of 13 Belsize Park Gardens, Hampstead, who was a “dealer in works of art.” Tissot’s portrait of him [measuring 29 by 21 in. (73.66 by 53.34 cm.); click here and scroll down to see it, http://tonyseymour.com/pages/gomes-silva] was passed down through the family until 1988, when it was sold at Sotheby’s for £50,000/$ 92,205 (Hammer price).

Tissot gave A Civic Procession Descending Ludgate Hill, London (c. 1879, oil on canvas, 84.5 x 43 in./214.6 x 109.2 cm.), previously called The Lord Mayor’s Show, to Léonce Bénédite, the Curator of the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris. The painting was purchased by the Corporaton of London through S.C. L’Expertise, Paris, from the curator’s granddaughter, Mme. Léonce Bénédite, in 1972 and is now in the collection of the Guildhall Art Gallery. It is not currently on view, but see James Tissot’s “A Civic Procession” (c. 1879).

Around 1885, Tissot gave Study for ‘Le Sphinx’ (Woman in an Interior) to Léonce Bénédite.

This image from TIssot’s La Femme à Paris series, which remained with the Bénédite family until it was sold around 1972, actually was a portrait of Louise Riesener (1860 – 1944). The same year, Tissot planned to marry Mlle. Riesener, the granddaughter of portrait painter Henri Riesener (1767 – 1828), a daughter of the painter Léon Riesener (1808-1878), and a cousin of painter Eugène Delacroix (1798 – 1863). Along with her sister Rosalie, she belonged to the same artistic social set as Berthe Morisot, for whom they modeled.

Unfortunately, one day when the forty-nine-year-old Tissot removed his overcoat in the front hall, his appearance struck his twenty-five-year-old fiancée as old-fashioned. Louise suddenly decided that she had lost her desire to marry.

In 2005, Study for ‘Le Sphinx’ sold at Sotheby’s, New York for $ 650,000 USD/£ 364,023 GBP (Hammer price).

Tissot exhibited July (Speciman of a Portrait), along with nine other paintings, at London’s Grosvenor Gallery – a sumptuous, invitation-only showcase for contemporary art in New Bond Street – in 1878, the year it was painted. The painting is one in a series representing months of the year, and the figure is modeled by Tissot’s mistress and muse, Kathleen Newton (1854 – 1882). The setting for July was the Royal Albion Hotel near the shore of Viking Bay in Ramsgate, a seaside resort on the Kent coast, seventy-eight miles southeast of London. At some point, another artist painted a frizzy red hairstyle (probably considered more up-to-date) on Kathleen Newton; In 1980, this original version was donated to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio at the bequest of Noah L. Butkin.

Tissot had painted a copy, showing Kathleen Newton wearing a tight blonde bun. Tissot gave this version of the painting to Emile Simon, administrator of the Théâtre l’Ambigu-Comique at 2, Boulevard Saint Martin, Paris from 1882 to 1884. Simon sold it as La Réverie in the five-day sale of his collection at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris in 1905. In 2002, this version of Seaside (also knownas July, La Réverie, or Ramsgate Harbour), signed and inscribed: “J.J. Tissot a l’am(i) E. Simon en bon Souvenir” (on the horizontal bar of the window frame), was sold by Christie’s, London for $ 2,161,740 USD/£ 1,400,000 GBP (Hammer price).

Other art experts whose collections included a Tissot oil painting include the wife of Paris Temps art critic M. Thiébault-Sisson. Mme. Thiébault-Sisson sold Tissot’s lovely Portrait of Mademoiselle L. L. (1864) at a Paris auction in 1907. The picture is now on display at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Tissot’s L’Ambitieuse (1883-1885), or The Political Woman, was owned by the American Impressionist painter William Merritt Chase (1849 –1916). In 1909, Chase donated the painting to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. It is not on view.

If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot. Read reviews.

The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.

NOTE: If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot. Read reviews.

Charles Dickens delivered the speech at the dinner in honor of the 102nd Royal Academy Exhibition in 1870, held for the first time in its new galleries in Burlington House, Piccadilly. Painter George Dunlop Leslie said it was by far the most eloquent and impressive speech he had ever heard at an Academy banquet: “It was the last public speech that he delivered, and possibly the finest.” It was followed by toasts to “The Sovereign,” “The Army and Navy,” and the health of Her Majesty’s Ministers, the officials’ required responses despite their knowledge of art or the patience of their audience, and finally the band of the Royal Artillery in the lecture-room.

Among the paintings crammed from floor to ceiling throughout the galleries were five pictures by the venerable SirEdwin Landseer, R.A. (1802 – 1873), who had sculpted the lions in Trafalgar Square even as he was slipping into insanity. One of his paintings, Queen and Prince Albert in the Highlands, already had been shown – unfinished – in 1854 by Royal Command, and Landseer had been repainting it over the past sixteen years, with disastrous results.

George FredericWatts, R.A. (1817 – 1904) exhibited Daphne, standing naked in the laurels, along with Fata Morgana and a portrait of painter EdwardBurne–Jones (1833 –1898).

Frederick Leighton, R.A. (1830 – 1896) had only a small picture, A Nile Woman, because an illness had prevented him from completing his large painting called Hercules Struggling with Death for the Resuscitation of Alcestes.

A Nile Woman, Frederick Leighton

The self-effacing Arthur Hughes (1832 – 1915), a well-liked man whose paintings – if not rejected – were never advantageously hung at the Royal Academy, had Sir Galahad and Endymion.

Sir Galahad by Arthur Hughes (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Age of Gallantry, by George Henry Boughton (1833 – 1905), was described as “a bit of last-century life treated with elegant humor and set in a pleasing effect of silvery haze.” Edward Poynter, A.R.A. (1836 – 1919) showed Andromeda and St. George and the Dragon, his drawing for the design of the glass mosaic in the Central Hall at Westminster.

George Adolphus Storey (1834 – 1919) exhibited Only a Rabbit (a picture of hunters returning home with little to show) and A Duet. William Yeames, A.R.A. (1835 – 1918), a gentleman painter who enjoyed playing tennis and spent holidays south-east of London at Hever Castle, had Maunday Thursday, Visit to the Haunted Chamber and Love’s Young Dream. George Dunlop Leslie, A.R.A. (1835 – 1921), a favorite of John Ruskin, exhibited Fortunes, in which a group of damsels try to divine their nuptial fortunes by throwing flowers in the water and watching as the flowers sink, stay or float away (meaning the marital fate is as yet unknown). According to one newspaper critic, this painting features “a gold brunette, with amorous eyes” gazing over the shoulder of another girl, who has a puppy on her lap and who evidently does not desire to know her connubial future. “It is Mr. Leslie’s best picture,” proclaimed this writer.

Among the younger artists represented at the Royal Academy in 1870 were Val Prinsep (1838 – 1904), who had The Death of Cleopatra, The Dish of Tea and Reading ‘Sir Charles Grandison.’

The Death of Cleopatra, by Val Prinsep

The Dish of Tea, by Val Prinsep

Simeon Solomon (1840 – 1905) exhibited A Youth Relating Tales to Ladies, which the reviewer for the Art Journal found “alarmingly lackadaisical,” sniping that “these ‘tales’ could not have sparkled with wit.”

Some foreigners and numerous women [who were not allowed to attend the annual Royal Academy dinner] provided a bit of diversity in the exhibition. Mrs. E. M. Ward (Henrietta Mary Ada Ward, 1832 – 1924),“at her best”according to one critic,exhibited The First Interview with the Divorced Empress Josephine with the King of Rome [while her husband,Edward Matthew Ward, R.A.(1816 – 1879) showed The Trial of Baxter, of ‘The Saint’s Everlasting Rest’ by Judge Jeffreys]. Miss Maria Spartali (1844 – 1927), a student of Ford Madox Brown (1821 – 1893), exhibited, along with his daughters: Miss Catherine Madox Brown (1850 – 1927) with Thinking and Miss Lucy Madox Brown (1843-1894; she would marry English writer and critic William Michael Rossetti in 1874) with A Duet. Miss Louise Romer (1843 – 1933), a determined 27-year-old painter just back from four years in Paris with her ne’er-do-well husband, Frank, submitted a three-quarters portrait of herself carrying a pot of azaleas that she called Bud and Bloom, which was rejected by the Hanging Committee. Her painting Consolation also was rejected, but she persevered; Frank had served as secretary to Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild, and he had been sacked for gambling. It was the Baroness de Rothschild who had encouraged Louise to pursue a career in art.

A Duet (1870), by Lucy Madox Brown. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Although many established British artists were of foreign ancestry or birth, “foreigners” in this Royal Academy exhibition included a number of French painters, such as Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824 – 1904), who displayed Jerusalem – andhis lurid scene of Parisian violence in a controversial execution by firing squad after Napolean’s defeat, The Death of Marshal Ley (also known as December 7, 1815, 9 O’Clock in the Morning). This picture must have seemed a jarring contrast on a wall filled with English damsels, British legends, genteel humor and sentimental slices of life, serene landscapes, allegories, and noble Classical history and mythology.

Alphonse Legros (1837 – 1911), a Frenchman who moved to England in 1863 and married Miss Frances Rosetta Hodgson (whom Dante Gabriel Rossetti described as a “nice little woman”), had three paintings; Scène de Barricade, Prêtres au Lutrin/ Two Priests at the Organ (now at the Tate Britain as Rehearsing the Service) and another of an old priest praying, Viellard au Prière. Though a foreigner, Legros was assimilating into the British Establishment as a respected teacher of etching at the South Kensington School of Art.

Nevertheless, the British maintained a skeptical view of the French. The March 5, 1870 issue of the British weekly journal, The Architect, carried an article, “Forthcoming Pictures at the Royal Academy,” which offered this: “Mr. Legros has this year chosen for the incident of his principal picture A Barricade, a subject which is dissimilar to those usually selected for illustration by this artist, but with which his nationality has doubtless made him familiar.”

James Jacques Joseph Tissot was born today, October 15, in 1836. He lived an improbable life in a time of political, social and artistic upheaval, and his story has not been told — until now.

The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, is now available for Kindle e-readers* ($5.99, Electronic ISBN: 978-0-615-68267-9). I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it! Read reviews.

James Tissot’s friends included Jimmy Whistler, Louise Jopling, J.E. and Effie Millais, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and many other figures of the dynamic 1870s during the birth of modern art in London and Paris. Follow my blog for the stories behind the story of this fascinating but little-known figure embroiled in the birth of Impressionism and modern art.

*NOTE: If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot.

He turned his back on the Paris art world and left France a ruined man.

He painted better than Britain’s best but lived under suspicion.

Will he be ruined a second time?

French painter James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836 – 1902) hit his artistic stride in Paris from 1864 to 1870, painting stylish modern women and aristocrats in his chic new studio in the leisured years before the Franco-Prussian War. After fighting bravely with the National Guard to defend Paris, he arrived in London with only a hundred francs to his name and a damaged reputation from some level of involvement with the radical Paris Commune. But he was a tireless and methodical worker as well as a virtuoso of the Academic painting style that he learned from Hippolyte Flandrin (1809 – 1864), Louis Lamothe (1822 – 1869) and the Neoclassical work of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780 – 1867), and he quickly rebuilt his life. In Paris, his wayward friends Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet struggled to sell their work; in London, his American expatriate friend Jimmy Whistler was a laughingstock. Through Tissot’s shrewd decisions in London, his career skyrocketed for a second time, from 1871 to 1879, and again he become a multi-millionaire.

But popular tastes change, and this decade saw the birth of modern art. Tissot was not a man ahead of his time – he was a man keeping up with the times. When the Impressionists redefined art on the Continent and Whistler ushered in the Aesthetic Movement in Britain, Tissot was out of step. With his essentially conservative work focusing on the psychological tension of the central figures and implied narrative, he quickly fell behind the trend of “art for art’s sake,” becoming a footnote in Art History.

The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot is a psychological portrait, exploring the forces that unwound the career of this complex man. After he fled Paris in 1871, there was no going back to his pre-war prominence. If he wanted to survive in the British Establishment’s art market, he had to decide whether to make it on their terms — or live the life he wanted, with the woman he loved.

The Hammock’s cast of characters includes Jimmy Whistler, Louise Jopling, J.E. and Effie Millais, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and many other figures of the dynamic 1870s during the birth of modern art in London and Paris. Follow my blog for the stories behind the story!